“DO you know that they plan to divert the road in Choiseul?” the doctor asked.
I could have played ignorant but I knew and so I confessed immediately. My heart was heavy, though, and my mind, disturbed. There is a move, deliberate or not, to make us 99th class citizens in our own country.
“Relegation. Relegation!” pounced on my mind. That dreaded morning that prophet Derek Walcott prophesied, we seem to be at the dawn of it.
All the people who seem not to have a problem with the road diversion are the people who do not live in the affected areas. When I speak to those affected people, they are alarmed and many of them still do not know of the plans.Word is that the road was sold to the developer, GP Group, for the Sunset Bay Resort in Sab Wisha.
Say what? I was as surprised and bewildered as you are to hear that.
“Can that really happen?” we asked the Parliamentary Representative at a meeting in Delcer.
Today, I need to know who is lying because the former administration vehemently denied that that never happened.
I am told that an environmental and social impact study was done. The social impact study seemed to have revealed that the people of Choiseul were most concerned about the road being taken away from them.
The road has history. I am told that at one time the road used to pass nearer to the beach. I walked that road several times to go to church in the 70s and 80s. It makes the journey to and from Delcer and Morne Sion and Feitte a lot more facile. It certainly seems that the developer wants Choiseulians as far away from their property as they can and so one wants to know now if that is the case, will they honour our right to access the beach. I feel threatened. The plantations without chains are stretching their poisonous tentacles.
I am also told that there was a plan to do a ring road just above the present road and the plan that I saw seems to make that evident. So just when did the road diversion become an option? I have to say that it had to have been negotiated under this administration. That the people of Choiseul should begin to think that the representative does not have their well-being at heart is justifiable. How can you even push that idea? But then again it is the same administration that wants to destroy Pigeon Island and Maria Islands. Our patrimony will indeed become our credit rating if these plans go ahead.
“They want to put us behind God’s back!” That is how the people are thinking.
“I watch the doomed acres where yet another luxury hotel is built and the ordinary people fenced out. These new plantations by the sea, slavery without chains.”